Setting the inept doggerel of William McGonagall's Address to the New Tay Bridge to music is either a brilliant postmodern coup or a wilfully absurd subversion. In the event, Robert Zuidam's music was a riotous send-up of overweening imperial ambition.
Lucy Shelton's soprano was a violently extreme parody of operatic excess and kitschy emotion, accompanied by locomotive riffs from an unusual ensemble of four cellos, double bass, two pianos and percussion. The denouement of the piece was a shriek from Shelton and the clanging of a dropped cake tin - a realisation of the epic fall of Victorian pride when the Tay Bridge collapsed.
It is impossible to talk of a single aesthetic to define Per Norgard's music, and the two pieces that the London Sinfonietta and Oliver Knussen programmed seemed to present utterly divergent sensibilities. The first, Prelude to Breaking, was a mesmerising study of microscopic variations in musical lines. In one passage a luminous gleam of string harmonics was set against spotlit interjections from the other instrumentalists and droplets of piano resonance. It was as if time had stood still in the instant before the crashing of a great wave.
The jaw-dropping virtuosity of Unendlicher Empfang for two pianos required the combined brilliance of Rolf Hind and Nicolas Hodges, and bright constellations of notes at the outer reaches of the pianos' compass came together in great, galactic blurs. At times there was an impenetrable, mathematical abundance about this music. When Hodges and Hind activated four metronomes ticking at different speeds, the fabric of the work seemed to shatter into the musical equivalent of a black hole. Yet for all this activity, there was a similar non-linear musical time in Unendlicher Empfang as in the revolving tapestry of Prelude to Breaking.
Next to these imaginings at the limits of musical possibility, Bayan Northcott's Horn Concerto was a paragon of sense and refined taste. The dense thematic argument of Northcott's music was always clear, nowhere more so than in the subtle interlockings of different tempi in the first movement. But there was poetry here, too, as in the horn's reflective shadowing of the second movement in an evocative epilogue, which Michael Thompson conveyed powerfully.
